What Obama Has in Store for Us - John Fund - National Review Online

What Obama Has in Store for Us - John Fund - National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313100/what-obama-has-store-us-john-fund

AUGUST 4, 2012 12:00 A.M. What Obama Has in Store for Us Dinesh D’Souza asks what a 2012 victory would mean. By John Fund ArchiveLatestRSSSend Promotional material for Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America inShare12 Print Text    Comments 56 John Fund  The latest line of attack on Mitt Romney by Obama supporters is the most breathtaking yet: Romney, we are told, is a stealth candidate. Michael Tomasky, who wrote the controversialNewsweek cover story declaring that Romney is a “wimp,” now accuses Romney of a “desire to sneak intothe White House all but unexamined by voters.” Holy Double Standard! Romney certainly could have handled the release of his tax returns better, and it’s likely he is concealing embarrassing details. But Barack Obama, aided and abetted by a subservient media, spent much of his 2008 campaign trying to conceal his radical roots and evading questions about his past. Stanley Kurtz, the author of the new Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, has demonstrated convincingly that theObama campaign lied to reporters (including me) about Obama’s involvement with the socialist New Party and his work for the infamous ACORN operation (which subsequently went bankrupt following a 2009 scandal). Similarly, scholar Paul Kengor has written a new book on Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s teenage mentor, entitled “The Communist.” Dave Weigel of Slateacknowledges that “Kengor’s bang-on right: Davis was an avowed Communist, and the media of 2008 didn’t care.” But Weigel thinks “Obama never pretended not to know Davis” and notes that Davis appears as the black-power advocate “Frank” in the president’s 1995 book Dreams from My Father. True enough, but Obama was certainly leery of too much scrutiny of Davis: The audio version of Dreams, read by Obama himself, removes all 24 references to “Frank” that appear in the printed text. Why the difference? Perhaps because the audio version wasn’t recorded until 2005, when newly elected U.S. senator Barack Obama was already contemplating a run for the White House. Advertisement Trying to figure out what makes Barack Obama tick, what influenced his thinking, and where he might take the country in a second term is the purpose of Dinesh D’Souza’s new $2.5 million documentary 2016: Obama’s America, which will premiere in hundreds of theaters on August 10. D’Souza, a bestselling author and the president of King’s College in New York, emigrated from India as a boy, and he says he understands something of how Obama’s exotic upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia might have shaped his view of America. But D’Souza, a conservative, sees America as a land of tolerance and opportunity. He believes Obama “adopted his [anti-colonialist] father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.” That may be stretching things just a bit, but remember, it was the president himself who just told small-business owners they can’t take credit for their own success. D’Souza travels the world in search of clues to Obama’s thinking, using Dreams fromMy Father as his Baedeker guide. In a couple of spots his evidence seems forced or incomplete, but much of what he finds is disturbing. An old academic friend of the late Barack Obama Sr. tells D’Souza he believes father and son shared the same anti-colonial, anti-Western outlook. Interestingly, one of the Kenyans whom D’Souza meets now thinks the British colonialists left too soon. George Obama, one of the president’s cousins, tells D’Souza that if the British had stayed, “they would have developed us. Instead, we were fighting over nothing!” 1   2   Next >